Begin the journey to a private cloud with datacenter virtualization

Tag Archives: vSphere 5.1

One of the most repetitive questions that I get asked is which version of vCenter Server should I be using. This obviously is based on the decision between using the vCenter Server appliance (VCSA) introduced with vSphere 5.0 or the trusted and proven vCenter Server on Windows.

It has been general knowledge that the vCenter Server appliance, since its introduction has lacked features to that of its Windows counterpart. With vSphere 5.5 the vCenter Server appliance has come a long way, it supports all solutions that integrate with vCenter Server (vCD, vCOPs, SRM, VUM etc) but is it production ready? I can confidently say yes but will it meet your requirements?Continue reading →

VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist allows you to monitor the virtual machines you care about in your vSphere infrastructure remotely on your phone. Discover diagnostic information about any alerts on your VMs using VMware Knowledge Base Articles and the web. Remediate problems from your phone by using power operations or delegate the problem to someone on your team back at the datacenter.
IMPORTANT NOTE: A VMware vSphere installation (5.0 and above) is required to use VMware vSphere Mobile Watchlist. Access to your vSphere infrastructure may need a secure access method like VPN. Contact your IT department for further assistance.

Part of my role at VMware is to work closely with our customers and partners, sharing experiences and feedback with internal VMware Product Management and Engineers to help make our products better. One area that has been dominantly more focused than others over the last 12 months has obviously been vCenter Single Sign-On.

Due to this feedback, one of the drivers for the new vCenter Single Sign-On was to provide backwards compatibility and to highlight this, a recent Knowledge Base article released.

A few weeks ago I saw on an internal email thread an ask from a customer via their VMware sale engineer. The customer was using AutoDeploy and Host Profiles. As part of this process, they were creating a local user on their ESXi hosts and when they connected to the host via the vSphere Client application on Windows, they were worried to see that the user was created with Shell Access already granted! As you can imagine, that’s probably not something you want done by default. Even more so when you’re in an environment that has compliance concerns. And especially when you have the Security Guy looking over your shoulder!

Well, like our friends from Down Under would say, “No Worries Mate”. What you are seeing here is a UI bug in the vSphere Windows Client. As you know, the vSphere Windows Client has been superseded by the new vSphere Web Client. But at the moment, it’s the main tool for configuration by those who connect to ESXi servers. With the vSphere Web Client being the current and future client user interface for vCenter Server managed objects and resources, the “old” vSphere Client may, at times, not be as current as we’d like.

VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager is a component that enables support for heterogeneous hypervisors in a VMware vCenter Server environment. It provides the following benefits to your virtual environment:

An integrated platform for managing VMware and third-party hypervisors from a single interface.

A hypervisor choice for the different business units in your organization to accommodate their specific needs.

No single hypervisor vendor lock-in.

When you add a third-party host to vCenter Server, all virtual machines that exist on the host are discovered automatically, and are added to the third-party hosts inventory.

The ability of vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager to migrate virtual machines from third-party hosts to ESX or ESXi hosts is implemented by exposing the capabilities of vCenter Converter Standalone in the vSphere Client. See VMware KB article 2048927 for information about dependency between vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager and vCenter Converter Standalone.

Key Capabilities

vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.1 introduces the following set of basic management capabilities over third-party hosts:

With the release of vCenter 5.1 adding additional certificates into the environment to make communication between components more secure, the process of updating these certificates with customers’ own signed certificates has been a challenge.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of vCenter Certificate Automation Tool1.0. This tool provides an automated mechanism to replace certificates in the following components of the vCenter Server 5.1 management platform:

One of the coolest feature in my opinion is Tagging in the new vSphere Web Client. Unlike Custom Attributes which was limited to an ESXi host and Virtual Machine object, the new Tagging capability allows you to create custom labels and metadata on ANY vSphere inventory object. In addition, you can have multiple tags per object and you can search based on tags to help you quickly find what you are looking and making this feature even more powerful. Just like with anything new, it takes time to get used to. To help you use the new Tagging feature, there is a built in Custom Attributes to Tags migration tool in the vSphere Web Client as Tagging will be the future going forward.

The installation of vSphere vCenter Sign-On is a relatively a straight forward process when planned correctly and as there are many factors of the environment that the installation process will touch, it is important to review the vCenter Single Sign-On Server prerequisites prior to deployment, preferably during the initial design phase. It is important to note that the vCenter Single Sign-On server is the first component to be installed prior to vCenter Server install or upgrade.